the islands

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     1.

What are the islands to me,
what is Greece,
what is Rhodes, Samos, Chios,
what is Paros facing west,
what is Crete?

What is Samothrace,
rising like a ship,
what is Imbros, rending the storm-waves
with its breast?

What is Naxos, Paros, Milos,
what is the circle about Lycia,
what, the Cyclades’
white necklace?

What is Greece—
Sparta, rising like a rock,
Thebes, Athens,
what is Corinth?

What is Euboia
with its island-violets,
what is Euboia, spread with grass,
set with swift shoals,
what is Crete?

What are the islands to me,
what is Greece?

     2.

What can love of land give to me
that you have not—
what do the tall Spartans know,
and gentler Attic folk?

What has Sparta and her women
more than this?

What are the islands to me
if you are lost—
what is Naxos, Tinos, Andros,
and Delos, the clasp
of the white necklace?

     3.

What can love of land give to me
that you have not,
what can love of strife break in me
that you have not?

Through Sparta enter Athens,
Thebes wrack Sparta,
each changes as water,
salt, rising to wreak terror
and fall back.

     4.

“What has love of land given to you
that I have not?”

I have questioned Tyrians
where they sat
on the black ships,
weighted with rich stuffs,
I have asked the Greeks
from the white ships,
and Greeks from ships whose hulks
lay on the wet sand, scarlet
with great beaks,
I have asked bright Tyrians
and tall Greeks—
“what has love of land given you?”
And they answered—“peace.”

     5.

But beauty is set apart,
beauty is cast by the sea,
a barren rock,
beauty is set about
with wrecks of ships,
upon our coast, death keeps
the shallows—death waits,
clutching toward us
from the deeps.

Beauty is set apart;
the winds that slash its beach,
swirl the coarse sand
upward toward the rocks.

Beauty is set apart
from the islands
and from Greece.

     6.

In my garden,
the winds have beaten
the ripe lilies;
in my garden, the salt
has wilted the first flakes
of young narcissus
and the younger hyacinth,
and the salt has crept
under the leaves of the white hyacinth.

In my garden,
even the wind-flowers lie flat,
broken by the wind at last.

     7.

What are the islands to me
if you are lost,
what is Paros to me
if your eyes draw back,
what is Milos
if you take fright of beauty,
terrible, torturous, isolated,
a barren rock?

What is Rhodes, Crete
what is Paros, facing west,
what, white Imbros?

What are the islands to me
if you hesitate,
what is Greece, if you draw back
from the terror
and cold splendour of song
and its bleak sacrifice?

(H.D., from Selected Poems, pp. 30–34.)

technology

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INTERVIEWER

How does your interest in flying technology fit into your view of technology in general, which is fairly suspicious? You’ve written several times, and eloquently, about cars, for instance, about how they’ve changed our views of space, of the city, of our own bodies.

DAVENPORT

The point of view I take is the point of view of Diogenes, which is that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man. The thing about technology is that it owns us. I know several desperately poor people, practically beggars, who own cars. On the other hand, you have people who drive their cars to work, to make a living, or to have a delightful excursion in it with the wife and children. But the point is that all progress asks that we pay a kind of ransom or blackmail in order to have it. The telephone is God’s gift to the bore.

(Guy Davenport interviewed by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review 163; noted by Wyatt Mason. See also: Patrick Kurp.)

still

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I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

(A. R. Ammons)

the birth of charles sanders peirce

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“Mademoiselle Charlotte Elizabeth Peirce
and
Doctor Charles Henry Peirce          at Salem

Today at 12 o’clock was born a boy. Its mother and it are both doing ‘finely’ and send you their very best love. The boy would have written, but is prevented by circumstances over which he has no control. He does not like this blue ink he says. He hung himself this afternoon to a pair of steelyards; but postponed the further execution of his wicked designs upon himself, because he found he wanted just one quarter of a pound of the nine pound which he regards as the minimum of genteel and fashionable suicide. At 8 1/2 this morning his mother – if she can be called his mother before he was – his future mother, or more transcendentally, the mother of this then child of futurity was well – or nearly so, the shadows of coming events having but slightly obscured the brightness of her countenance.

               B. Peirce”

(Kenneth Laine Kettner, His Glassy Essence: an Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 63–64.)

a dedication

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“To the famous Mr. Jukes is this book dedicated in appreciation for the use of Mr. Jukes’ descendant, Detective Simon Grundt of the Lincoln School for the Feeble-Minded.”

(Harry Stephen Keeler, The Green Jade Hand: In Which a New and Quite Different Type of Detective Unravels a Mystery Staged in Chicago, Bagdad on the Lakes, London of the West! (1930), p. v.)

have tended to confuse

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“Poetry brings similitude and representation to configurations waiting from forever to be spoken. North Americans have tended to confuse human fate with their own salvation. In this I am North American. ‘We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,’ sand the Union troops at Gettysburg.”

(Susan Howe, from “There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover,” p. 14 in The Europe of Trusts.)

diaries

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“People buy a diary because the author is famous, while I wrote mine in order to become famous. That is where the misunderstanding lies.”

(Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament, trans. Alastair Hamilton, p. 120.)

towards an etymology of mathematical notation

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“André Weil, in fact, invented for this book the universal notation we use today for the empty set: ∅.

This symbol comes from the Norwegian alphabet, which Weil had encountered in his travels. The Bourbaki text on set theory thus introduced this new mathematical symbol.”

(Amir Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician: the story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed, p. 93.)

three aphorisms

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“Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Période Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.”

“For every lack of civilization we pay dearly with boredom, outrage, death.”

“Butler’s insight was that the machine enslaved us, changing all work to drudgery. All work became pandering to the reproduction of the machines.”

(Guy Davenport, Apples and Pears, p. 64, p. 77, p. 163.)